Open AccessPerceived morality of direct versus indirect harm: Replications of the preference for indirect harm effect
Author(s) -
Ignazio Ziano,
Yu Jie Wang,
Sydney Susanto Sany,
Long Ho Ngai,
Yuk Kwan Lau,
Iban Kaur Bhattal,
Pui Sin Keung,
Yan To Wong,
Wing Zhang Tong,
Bo Ley Cheng,
Hill Yan Chan,
Gilad Feldman
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
meta-psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2003-2714
DOI - 10.15626/mp.2019.2134
Subject(s) - harm , preference , psychology , social psychology , statistics , mathematics
Royzman and Baron (2002) demonstrated that people prefer indirect harm to direct harm: they judge actions that produce harm as a by-product to be more moral than actions that produce harm directly. In two preregistered studies, we successfully replicated Study 2 of Royzman and Baron (2002) with a Hong Kong student sample (N = 46) and an online American Mechanical Turk sample (N = 314). We found con- sistent evidential support for the preference for indirect harm phenomenon (d = 0.46 [0.26, 0.65] to 0.47 [0.18, 0.75]), weaker than effects reported in the original findings of the target article (d = 0.70 [0.40, 0.99]). We also successfully replicated findings regarding reasons underlying a preference for indirect harm (di- rectness, intent, omission, probability of harm, and appearance of harm). All materials, data, and code are available at osf.io/ewq8g.